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Swap isn't just for when you run out of ram though.

Don't look at swap as more memory on slow / hdds. Look at it as a place the kernel can use if it needs a place to put something temporarily.

This can happen on large memory systems fairly easily when memory gets fragments and something asks for a chunk of memory than can't be allocated because there isn't a large enough contiguous block, so the allocation fails.

I always do a least a couple of GBs now for swap... I won't really miss the storage and that at least gives the kernel a place to re-org/compact memory and keep chugging along.





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